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Monday, February 1, 2016

Blade & Soul Impressions!

January was a busy month, sorry for the lack of posts, hopefully after the next week things will slow down soon. The new year rang in with me being really sick and then a bunch of stuff going on IRL, ANNNNND then Blogger wanted to be stupid when I finally sat down to write this.... Sigh. I did manage to jump into Blade and Soul though, I've been waiting on this game for quite some time! Today I'll share my thoughts thus far.

I didn't get much in with the first few days of Blade and Soul as I was out of town. But I got back in time to experience the queues. If you were a subscriber, that helped on some servers, if not the queues were massive. There were new servers added, which was something. Queues have seemed to die down completely, at least on my server. I still see people everywhere I go. I often change channels to try to get quests done quicker. You can do so by clicking the channel number over the mini map, which pulls down a drop down menu, and pick from several. It helps sometimes. That is such a great feature.

My thoughts this far is that it is a fun game. It is mainly combat focused, but there is plenty to do. Daily quests galore, you can even go back to older zones to farm daily quests, there are also costumes to farm, dungeons to run, wheels to spin which you need currency for and so on. I don't run out of things to go after. So, while it is combat focused there is always something to do. It is a theme-park, but it isn't bad if you come to the game expecting just that. And for a Eastern game it is quite simple to understand, I haven't found any of the systems in the game to be overly complicated. I feel quite at home in BnS as an mmo player.

I play the summoner class, it is all I have played, as soon as I saw this class years ago it was all I have wanted to play. I am about halfway into my 30's and the cap is 45. I can tell some of the classes are harder to master than others. The summoner isn't hard to play, but I find myself pushing it to see just how much I can do. Sometimes I can solo much more than I thought possible, such as some of the 'easier' group dungeons. Or even being a few levels over. It is quite fun, I love the cat companion!!

As far as the summoner goes, the game has some fantastic combat. I haven't always been all over the action combat games, but BnS has some fantastic combat, it is quick and fun. Sometimes it taxes my hands as I have CTS, but that is any action MMO. IF you hit Shift+F2 you can change this to the classic MMO type of play, think EQ/WoW. I think this is such a nice option! Love that it is there. Options are great.

There are tons of costumes to collect and they all look different on each race, which is a cool little touch. No mounts kind of bites, but there is the 'dash' like ability which allows you to run and jump and glide, which feels pretty natural. There is PvP, but unlike many other eastern MMO games, there isn't constant open flagging. You have the choice of when and where by equipping a faction costume.On occasion you'll get a jerk attacking you while you have like ten mobs on you, real cute that... Most of the time, other players will just join in on the farming. Which is cool. Other than that, I don't know much about PvP, there is the arena/duel system, but I can't give any insight or thoughts on it.

Dungeons have been pretty quick and fun. I rarely do dungeons in games these days but I hop right into them in BnS. There are no real tank or healing classes, so it makes getting a group quite fast. There is the dungeon finder, there is also the dungeon lobby for cross server groups, which is awesome. No damage meters so far, things die so fast I don't think they are needed. Then again I like players looking at the game and what's going on, instead of meters.

There are a lot of great things IMO about this game that are solid and good. There are things that bother me too. One of the most annoying is the lack of mobs in some areas. Not enough spawns for the amount of people playing, which will not be such an issue as the game ages. For now it can make some quests quite daunting. Some parts of upgrading your Hongmoon weapon can get quite grindy if you are just opening up random boxes and don't have a key, while other parts are cake. You must keep upgrading your weapon and accessories, some of these require world bosses, currency or dungeons to complete. You also bid on items in the dungeons. Though the money that was used to bid goes to the group, which is sort of neat I guess. Classes are locked into races. I want to be a summoner, so I have to be a Lyn, which is a childlike race. Luckily I can make mine taller and I like it so far. Thankfully she isn't like a lalafel, lol. I do wish we had mounts, as running long distances becomes a pain. And there is the fact that money is scarce at the lower levels, so use your ports wisely. You can map teleport quickly but you need money for upgrading weapons and other things. Somehow I find enough to make ends meet and blow some on silly stuff. Sell everything you can to other players, it helps tremendously.

That about sums up my initial reactions and thoughts until I get to the end game. So far it offers fun and fast combat, easy to get in and out of, all around good for me at the moment, being so busy lately. Plus, we already get an update to our version of the game this month, about nine days away! So, seems plenty more to do in the future once I catch up. More to come in a week, going to be pretty busy- but I just had to get this post out before it had been too long! If you haven't tried Blade and Soul, it's free, very fun and worth a spin!

Pick me! You can pick from one of four different cats as a summoner.

It is fun to dress up these feline friends!

Questing, that baby is almost as big as me...

A costume from one of the first areas.

Loved this tree, was so neat.

Moving along to cooler looking areas.

My cat got very fat. He's gone on a diet since then. Errr.. She. They're all she cats.

I guess that fellow died from waiting so long on respawns...

Cross server LFD lobby, yeah I was a bit too low for this one...lol, oops.

AS well as changing your cats size and weight, you can also change fur colors, eyes, expressions.

3 comments:

Once again you have piqued my curiosity about a game I had no intention of trying. I knew it looked great and I love the pictures I've seen of the cat companion but I'd had no interest in downloading Blade and Soul because I don't want to play another "Action" MMO. Then you tell me it has dual controls!

If it can be played as a hotkey clicking WoW clone then I have no reason not to give it a go! I have a week off work next week so I might even have time to play it after I download it.

Hope to read about your adventures with it! It is fun, easy for something on the side or even enough to keep you busy for longer. I started with the BnS control scheme, so by the time I found out you could do classic, it felt weird for me. But I have been thinking about toying with classic some seeing how it feels. Liked what I tried with it though!